Nudging Beyond the Comfort Zone: Efficient Strategy-Guided Exploration for RLVR

Researchers introduced NudgeRL, a strategy-guided exploration method for RLVR that steers rollouts toward diverse reasoning paths.

It uses lightweight strategy-level contexts plus inter- and intra-context rewards, then distills the resulting behavior into the model.

The method outperforms standard GRPO and remains strong against oracle-guided baselines on five math benchmarks.

The work tackles RLVR’s exploration bottleneck with a more efficient approach that avoids costly brute-force rollouts and privileged supervision.